Badlands (Lonely Planet Travel Literature) by Wheeler Tony

Author:Wheeler, Tony [Wheeler, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lonely Planet Publications
Published: 2011-03-31T18:30:00+00:00

Funny how things always look darker at night. I wake up in the middle of the night worried about how the crossing to Iran might go and that unease colours the rest of the day. Before departing Arbil I waste some time tracking down the small, rather dusty and forgotten archaeological museum. Finding things that nobody seems to know about is never easy and having language difficulties to grapple with doesn’t help.

Coming back into the Sheraton car park, halfway through my museum search, I encounter a couple of burly Western guys checking over their armoured Land Cruiser. One of them sports a T-shirt announcing that sleeping soundly in bed is only an option for some people (presumably his clients) because some other people (presumably wearing T-shirts like his) are ready to exact extreme violence upon some other unspecified people. It’s a slightly enhanced version of the quote attributed to George Orwell that ‘people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf’, but it fits the situation well.

I don’t expect for a second they’re going to know where the museum is (they don’t), but I ask anyway and at least get some advice about safety.

‘You haven’t got a driver? Take care. This may be Kurdistan, but it’s still Iraq. It’s dangerous out there.’

Which I guess it would be with a T-shirt like that.

At the hotel desk, after some discussion, since most of the staff also aren’t aware there is a museum, I’m given instructions: straight up the way I was going, but driving distance rather than walking. With Kurdish written instructions in hand I flag down a taxi, set off up the road, stop to ask bystanders, U-turn and eventually end up right back where I gave up in the first place. I was standing right outside the museum when I was directed back past the Sheraton and, remarkably, it’s exactly where my ancient guidebook said it was, just past the Hamarawan Hotel.

I’ve arranged another car and driver and soon after we’re heading south, with Arvan sporting his Beijing 2008 Olympics sweatshirt at the wheel. The road towards Sulaymaniyah is fast and fraught, a straight road with lots of traffic and lots of hairy overtaking manoeuvres. In northern Iraq driving is probably the most dangerous activity. Frustratingly none of the names on my Iraq map pop up and when there is a name it isn’t on my map. I have a suspicion that cartographers working on maps like this simply put in the big places we all know about – Arbil, Kirkuk and Baghdad along this route – and then make up a bunch of names to scatter in between.

So between dodging oncoming trucks we’re heading down the highway towards Kirkuk, although I’m expecting we’ll turn off to the east sometime before we get there.

A few months earlier Geoff Hann, an Englishman who ran tours through Iraq back in the 1970s and was looking at the place again, had also set out from Arbil towards Kirkuk, ‘despite being strongly warned against it’.

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